I thought I'd share my experience when I visited South Africa to do volunteer work for 3 months at a farm. In April 2012 I sat my bum on plane, and then another plane and yet another that finally took me to Durban Airport in South Africa after about 20 painstakingly long hours. 193 centimeters and planes are not a match made in heaven.
Arriving at the farm I was first greeted by a fluffy and excited mass of dogs in various sizes and breeds. When the dust began to settle I could discern 10 or so people, some that I had already met through the volunteer organization and others that I had only been communicating with online. After a hearty welcome I was shown to the room I was to sleep in and share with a guy from Canada the first two weeks. It was actually in a wood house that I, together with about 20 others, built the first time I visited the farm in 2009. Quite amazing to sleep in a house that you've built from scratch with your own hands to be honest.
I was quite eager to start with the farm duties and the next day the man who distributed tasks put me on a job to hoe a rather large patch of dirt to prepare it for planting chilies, a job that took me about 1½ work days. I noticed that I was in a quite bad physical shape and getting tired very fast, which is probably why he put me on a relatively light job to begin with. The first weeks I mainly worked with picking weeds in the plant nursery – a job that's quite the test on your patience – and also with sifting horse poo and dirt to create nutritious plant fertilizer. I later asked if I could join the other guys digging ditches for plant irrigation – a quite massive project that took us several weeks. As I worked in the physical I simultaneously worked on points that I noticed in relation to physical work, physical abilities and comparison – points and patterns within which I compromised my physical health. Once I worked through those points I adapted a sensitivity and responsiveness towards my physical body and began to ‘listen’ to it, instead of doing physical work from the starting point of wanting to prove myself or to ‘please’ others.
The last time I was at the farm I isolated myself for hours and hours, hiding from everyone, hiding from myself. I went in to the same pattern again, but someone was always there to remind me that “HEY! You are going into that pattern again!” – for which I am immensely grateful. Ultimately it's my own responsibility to not participate in such patterns though. (See my other posts on social anxiety 1 2 3).
In my visit in 2012 I also worked with the horses, something that I avoided in 2009 – both because of fear of taking care of a huge animal as a horse as well as a resistance of going up earlier than 7 in the morning. But this time when I was asked by one of the girls I took the challenge to learn something new and push through both my early morning resistance and the ideas I had around horses (and ideas about myself in relation to horses). I learned basic horse care such as cleaning hooves, brushing the body and looking for tics. What was less nice was the quite poisonous night adders that hid in the stables every morning. I'm glad that I pushed myself to wake up at 5:40-6 in the mornings though, because the beauty of the misty South African mornings are hard to beat.
About 6 weeks into my visit I was hit with extensive lower back pain, and I had to stop working with the heavy duties, but worked with another person with placing irrigation pipes and vaults on fencing and other lighter duties. This back pain was related to a multitude of points and dimensions that I worked with and had assistance with throughout my visit.
Ultimately the visit had a very stabilizing and grounding effect and cleared up a lot of points. And I learned a lot in terms of physical and practical work as well. In between all of this there was a spider bite (I was bitten by a black widow), song recordings, encounters with weird critters and snakes, a visit to the beautiful botanical garden in Pietermaritzburg, daily cooking for 20+ people, a couple of sunstrokes and hundreds, if not thousands of laughs, hilarities and even cries.
(Parts of this post has also been posted elsewhere by myself)